Grave of the Fireflies
(aka: Hotaru no haka)
(1988)
review by Big McLargehuge

Everyone should see this film once.

Akiyuki Nosaka lived through the American bombing raids on Tokyo during the closing months of World War 2, and brought his remembrances of this time to the printed page with his book Hotaru no haka. It seems strange that in a genre known so well for kick-ass action sequences, outlandish space opera, giant fighting robots, and all manner of demonic possession, that anime would present perhaps the best antiwar film ever made, and do so in such a quiet and serene manner.

Grave of the fireflies begins with death. One of the tens of thousands of nameless, faceless refugees of the fading Japanese Empire, too young to soldier and too old for an orphanage, succumbs to hunger in the shattered remains of a Tokyo subway.

Beside his lifeless body is a small empty tin that once held hard candies, though now it contains nothing but a few marbles. One of the sanitation men who discovers the body tosses the tin out into the tall grass.

The tin opens and the ghostly form of a young girl emerges. She beckons to the corpse, whose spirit leaves the dead body and joins her.

In the next 100 or so minutes we will know virtually every detail about the last few months of these dead children’s lives, and it will be exhilarating, harrowing, angering, and above all tragic.

Flash back to a cool Tokyo morning as a the sky fills with B29 Super fortresses. They drop incendiary bombs that float to the ground on small parachutes. These weapons seem almost demonically cruel once you realize that the vast majority of buildings in Tokyo were constructed of little more than rice paper and wood.

Soon the city is engulfed in a horrible conflagration. Saito and his toddler sister Setsuko lost their mother in the flames while desperately trying to flee the city. With their mother burned beyond recognition, the children are farmed off to a distant aunt.

At first things seem okay, Saito and Setsuko are at least sheltered from the immediate dangers of war. But, there is a problem. Food is scarce, very scarce, and the aunt resents the two new mouths she must feed.

The aunt is a strange character for this, or any other sort of film. She is cast a villain, not so much by any innate sense of evil, but by the circumstances under which she and all of Japan lived. With starvation only a few meals away at any given time it is very easy for her to turn on the children, exploit their meager death benefits, and make conditions so horrible that they are forced to leave.

Soldiers, it seems, are not the only predators during wartime.

Saito and Setsuko decide to make a life for themselves in an abandoned bomb shelter outside the city. From this point on it’s a slow descent towards starvation and death.

What makes Grave of the Fireflies so remarkable is the incredible amount of depth given to the characters. Saito, now the sole guardian of Setsuko, must provide food, comfort and guidance to a child of maybe three years old. He cannot possibly succeed, and we know this, but his efforts are heroic none the less. Yet somewhere, somehow, inside the audience will find some event, some idea, to grasp on to, that if they can just survive for a few more days then someone, some benevolent person among all the indifference and chaos of war-torn Japan will find them, and feed them, and love them.

And we know that it won’t happen. We know that the boy starved to death in the subway at the beginning is Saito, that the ghost is Setsuko, yet we still watch, and hope, and in some cases pray, that the end will be different.

I think that’s what makes the viewing experience so compelling, that identification with the milieu, the experience, and our own culture of fairy tales where the good triumphs eventually, and where they all live happily ever after.

This film is not of our culture here in the United States, which may make Grave of the Fireflies somewhat enigmatic to the viewing public. It’s a pity too, because the story is so engrossing, so beautifully brought to life, and so tragic, so horrible, that one cannot fail to be moved to tears.

Grave of the Fireflies is a Studio Ghibli production. Ghibli, of course, is well known now in the US as the studio responsible for the Academy Award Winning animated film Spirited Away directed by Hiyao Myaszaki. Grave of the Fireflies Director Isao Takahata produced two of Myazaki’s films, Nausicaa Valley of the Wind, and Castle in the Sky. Like the Myazaki films, Isao Takahata’s character designs tend toward the realistic, which in a film as unflinching as this only hammers home the measure of tragedy in the plot. The backgrounds are art gallery quality, the animation fluid and perfect, and as is the trademark of the Ghibli Studio, subdued in places.

It always surprises me that a process as arduous as single-frame animation that the director would want parts of the film to well... just sort of be there... without adding to, or subtracting from, the plot. In one sequence Saito slowly stirs a pot of boiling rice, and it dawned on me that I was watching what was probably 200 hours of work, just to watch a character stir rice in silence.

I have a thing for antiwar films, All Quiet on the Western Front, Men Behind the Sun, The Sand Pebbles, and others that put a face on the chaos and suffering of those both in and out of uniform, but Grave of the Fireflies tops them all. The quiet relentless struggle of Saito and Setsuko has lived within me for years since I first saw this, and it will continue to do so long after the DVD is placed back on the shelf.

Watch it. Watch it with your friends and your relatives. Watch it with your children. It could very well change everything you ever thought about war and its repercussions.

Central Park Media offers this film in several formats, dubbed or subtitled VHS, and both a regular and collectors edition DVD.

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